


I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath: imagine for yourself what I became, deprived at once of both my life and death.

by 26stars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Empathic Bond, F/M, Major death is Robbie's, Soul Bond, Soulmate AU, Soulmates, but let's remember how that works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 07:54:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13243863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: In a universe where soulmates feel and experience each other's injuries, Skye's experiences of broken bones she didn't earn is fairly typical. Dying and coming back to life, however, is something extraordinary.aospositivity exchange 2017Title from Dante's Inferno





	I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath: imagine for yourself what I became, deprived at once of both my life and death.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey look! A fic that isn't about May!
> 
> I've always wanted to try a soulmate fic and the prompt I got for the exchange was just the incentive I needed. This is my first time writing Robbie though, and I'd forgotten how much I liked him. Hope we see him again in season 5!

In a world where soulmates are connected from birth by a shared empathic neurological bond, Mary holds onto one hope throughout her childhood’s miserable carousel of foster homes—the hope that even if no one around her wanted her, there was someone out there in the world who was meant to be hers.

She gives up on the dream of adoption by the time she’s eleven, though she never gives up on the sliver of possibility that her parents are still out there somewhere. Her connection with her soulmate, whoever he or she is, however, adds a dimension of confusion and a whole other search goal once she gets older and learns how to hack.

By the time Skye is in her early twenties and able to tunnel into digitized hospital records, she has long since forgotten the exact dates of some of her childhood injuries that she has her soulmate to thank for. Regular rounds of bruises and scrapes that simply appeared without cause was not an uncommon phenomenon in her world—most people grew up with double the bumps and bruises, since children will be children. Some of her soulmate’s injuries had been exceptional, however, and that was how Skye hoped to track him (or her) down.

She realizes that she might as well be using a flashlight to scour a Grand Canyon, but Skye still tries scanning hospital records for instances of children who received stitches to the chin in May 1998. She had been eight and sitting in a second-grade classroom when she had cried out in pain, her chin suddenly splitting open and gushing blood. She had needed stitches for it, so she’s assuming her soulmate did too, but as she searches, she realizes that not knowing if her soulmate is a boy or girl, or older or younger than her, will make this search take a lot longer.

Still, she sifts out a few possibilities, then cross-references them with her second search, then the third—a broken right arm in October 1995, and two broken fingers on the left had in February 2005. The broken arm had gotten her re-homed from her current foster family; even though little Mary had insisted that it was a “buddy” injury and not something that happened because of anyone in the home, her caseworker had been suspicious enough (which, Skye is now old enough to recognize, it was her job to be). The broken fingers had happened in the middle of the day when she was already living at Saint Agnes’s, stealing her breath as the bones spontaneously snapped inside the digits. The nuns had been skeptical when she described the pain and at first refused to take her to a hospital, but Sister McKenna had seen the swelling and bruising at dinner that night and immediately taken Skye to urgent care.

Now, years away from those foster homes and that orphanage, Skye cannot find any records of the same person admitted to any ER with all the same injuries from the correct times. There could be any number of reasons for this, she knows. Maybe the boy or girl was from a poor family who didn’t want the hospital bills. Maybe they didn’t live in the United States (she eventually expanded her search to Canadian hospitals, but her luck wasn’t any better). Maybe her soulmate was just a tough kid who dealt with their injuries on their own. There was no way to know.

All she could do, just like everyone else in her world, was wait, and let fate do its thing.

~

Robbie’s childhood wasn’t particularly extraordinary for a child of LA. He played with his brother and cousins on the street until dark almost every night, then went home to his mom and dinner. When he was eight, he attempted to scale the side of an abandoned building on a dare but fell, his arm snapping as he tried to break his fall on the blacktop. His mother had been angry but also visibly terrified as she dragged him to a neighbor’s house where she asked for a ride to an emergency room. Getting the red cast on his arm was the only time he saw the inside of a hospital—when it was time for it to be removed, his mother took him to her friend at the body shop to carefully cut it off.

He went to elementary school, and in fifth grade attempted a trick on the swingset to impress his classmates but tripped on the landing and split his chin open on the ground. The school nurse had known about his family’s financial situation and done the stitches herself in the office, for which his mom thanked her by inviting her to a week of dinners.

He went to middle school, then high school, but when his mom got sick during sophomore year and could no longer hold down a job, he dropped out in order to work full time at the auto shop, where he’d been working part time basically since he was twelve. His mother only lasted six months after that, but it was enough time to make sure that everything was put in order so that Uncle Eli would take custody of him and Gabe after she passed. At her funeral, Robbie had two fingers splinted with materials he was able to find in the shop—he’d punched the hood of a car when Eli had come in to tell him the news.

They moved on—Eli made good money at the plant and deeded everything to Robbie when he turned eighteen. Gabe made honor roll every semester of high school, and because he didn’t need to work after school to pay the bills, he was able to join the soccer team. Robbie was proud of him every day and only jealous once in a blue moon.

Robbie had had a few girlfriends over the years but had given little thought to his soulmate—occasionally, he had bruises he didn’t remember getting, and once when he was twelve and sweeping floors at the auto shop, he’d suddenly fallen to the ground gasping in pain, his shoulder abruptly dislocated from its socket. Another mechanic had knocked it back into place, slapped him on the back, and made a comment about how his soulmate must be quite the adventurous girl. That was one of the last times Robbie noticed an injury that wasn’t his own.

Then came an autumn night when Gabe was coming home from a late soccer practice one night and caught Robbie sneaking Eli’s Charger out of the garage for a race, and Robbie invited him along for the first time and what would also be the last time.

Someone chased them. Shot them. The car flipped. Robbie remembers begging for mercy, for the universe to spare his brother. He remembers a man with a flaming skull stooping over him and asking if he wanted another chance.

Then flames filled him to his fingertips, and Robbie stopped feeling anything at all.

~

She is twenty-two and living out of her van the night that she falls down outside a convenience store, her sack of food tumbling from a limp hand and her cheek smacking the asphalt as she doesn’t break her fall. She wakes up to a circle of people standing over her, her shirt and bra cut open and defibrillator paddles on her chest. She’s in too much pain to feel embarrassed—once she can say anything, she can only scream in agony. One of the EMTs gives her a shot of morphine that does nothing, and once they get an IV in her hand, they push something into her veins that makes her disappear in blackness.

But she can still feel the pain.

She comes to in an ER, hooked up to too many machines and completely alone. Her body is immobilized with restraints over her arms and calves, and eventually, the nurse-doctor combo arrives to explain.

“You were found in a parking lot with broken limbs, contusions and lacerations all over your head and body, and no heartbeat,” the doctor explains, checking her chart. “EMTs arrived within a few minutes, and someone must have been performing CPR on you in the meantime because you started breathing again after the first defibrillator shock. By the time you arrived at the hospital, many of your wounds had closed, but you were running an impossibly high fever and obviously in great pain. We’ve kept you under for two days to monitor you and restrained you so you wouldn’t injure yourself. Seems like the only injuries you still have, however, are the ones you sustained from collapsing in the parking lot.”

She has no way to pay for a hospital stay, so she writes false information down on every form they put in front of her and runs away the second she has the chance, forgetting only after she’s out the door that her van is still back in that parking lot. A kind stranger gives her a lift, and she immediately skips town, deleting any hospital records of herself as soon as she’s back on a Wi-Fi connection.

Only after all this does she finally let herself wonder what in the hell happened to her soulmate, what traumatic incident had stopped his or her heart and left them broken and bleeding, surely dead.

The impossible disappearance of all the injuries— _it can’t be true. Whoever saw me go down must have seen wrong._

But the fever, the pain…that part, she remembers clearly.

 _Did my soulmate die?_ she wonders. _Am I really and truly alone now?_

But then it happens again a few months later.

She’s asleep in the back of her van when she gasps awake, her head splitting with pain and her body drenched with sweat. She can barely breathe or move and can only lie on her air mattress, twitching and confused, until the spell abruptly passes, the pain and heat disappearing just as suddenly as they came.

She has no idea what to think. She scours the Internet for people describing any similar experiences, be they on WebMD or SoulSearching message boards, but no one else is out there talking about anything like this.

When she joins up with SHIELD and moves into their Bus, it takes a few months before she gets caught in the middle of an episode. They had always, always happened at night before, but now that her home is a globe-hopping Winnebago of a plane, she had forgotten that time zones would likely be her undoing. Coulson, his team, and herself are all in the middle of the Hub, her first time in a real-life Secret Government Facility, and she and Simmons are walking back to their plane in the hangar when she suddenly feels the headache clamp around her skull. The pain steals her vision for a moment, and she stumbles on the ramp. Simmons catches her hand, and through the screaming pain Skye hears her exclaim about her body’s temperature, hears her shout for help…

Skye doesn’t manage to protest strongly enough. By the time the headache passes, Simmons has her laid out on the floor of their plane’s lab, a blanket bundled beneath her head, an IV in her arm, and May holding a wet compress against her forehead.

“Coulson called in emergency medical—“ Simmons starts to say, and Skye grabs her hand.

“Call it off,” she gasps through gritted teeth. “It’s not me—it’s my soulmate.”

“You were running a fever of a hundred and twenty, Skye,” Simmons snaps, showing Skye the history on the digital thermometer. “That’s impossible.”

“Call off the med team,” Skye repeats, shaking her head and trying to elbow herself off the floor. “I’ll be fine. This happens sometimes. I’m always okay.”

“This isn’t normal,” Simmons insists as Skye sits up. “No human could run a fever that high and survive, let alone run one multiple times and bounce back without brain damage.”

“Maybe I’m lucky and it’s not a human; it’s an Asgardian,” Skye grumbles, holding out her arm. “Please just take the needle out.”

There’s only one other time that she’s caught in the middle of an episode on the plane, and it’s possibly the most embarrassing. She must have collapsed from the pain in the middle of the tiny shower cubicle, for she wakes up to May sitting her up against the waterproof wall, tucking a towel around her and trying to fan her face with her free hand.

“Can you hear me, Skye?” the woman is repeating in an anxious voice, tapping her cheek with her fingers as she presses her thumb to the space between Skye’s lips and nose. “Can you hear me?”

“What…” Skye grumbles, jerking away from her touch. “I hear you.”

“Did you black out?” the pilot asks, staring seriously at her. She’s turned off the shower’s water, thankfully, but the area around them is still uncomfortably muggy. “I heard you fall and you didn’t answer when I knocked.”

“So you broke in?” Skye says, tightening her towel around herself and trying not to glower. _Don’t be mad at her, she was just worried._

“I’m the pilot—I’ve got the master key,” May reminds her.

“Well, I’m fine now, so…” Skye tries to lever herself off the floor but fails, and May doesn’t ask if she can before she lifts Skye by her arms and sets her on her feet.

“How often does it happen?”

The agent is watching Skye carefully as she raises her head, steadying herself with one hand against the wet wall.

“It’s not regular. Sometimes it happens a few nights in a row. Sometimes it’s a lot longer in between.”

“You have no idea who your soulmate is? What they do?”

“I know nothing,” Skye mumbles, ducking her head and edging past May, leaving wet footprints on the carpet on the way to her bunk. “Absolutely nothing.”

A few months later, after Hydra rips their world apart, after Fitz and Simmons are out of their comas (it’s a miracle they both survived, all things considered) and moving forward again, after Coulson has locked Ward in their basement and May has taken over her training…

Only then is Skye brave enough to bring it up.

“Have you met your soulmate?” she asks as she and May change clothes one morning after training. She’s glimpsed May’s scars a few times by now, and there isn’t one where an Asgardian spear might have gone through her heart.

Skye had always just assumed…

May doesn’t even pause in her dressing, but Skye sees her nod.

This, somehow, is worse.

“How old were you when you met him?” she asks. _And where is he now?_

“I was thirty-five. We were married barely more than a year.”

“What happened?” Skye dares to ask, and May slams her locker shut.

“Bahrain happened. And then I divorced him.”

She walks out, leaving Skye feeling cold. Though she knows it happens more often than people would like to think, it’s never easy to imagine that the person who is your soulmate isn’t always the person you spend the rest of your life with.

Months pass, crystals turn her into a walking natural disaster, and she ends up meeting May’s soulmate under unfortunate circumstances. It turns out that the control she thought she had over her powers was just an illusion, and when Skye hears that she has seventy-two fractures between her two arms, she has the presence of mind to offer a silent apology to her soulmate, whoever and wherever they are, for any pain they’re sharing with her.

She goes to Afterlife and comes back minus two parents but with at least a clue of how to control her powers. She and Lincoln share something meaningful, but she already knows that they don’t belong to each other. Doesn’t make it hurt any less when he dies.

She has her reasons for leaving SHIELD. Too much blood on her hands, too much pain in every corner, too much shame for all of it. She can do good, but they deserve better than the hell she’s brought them for years.

It’s time to go back to where she started.

~

He’s locking up the Charger after his latest night ride when Robbie hears a voice carry across the darkened lot.

“Excuse me?”

He slides the doors closed as he turns, and dark-haired girl in a black knitted cap steps out of the shadows. Her hands are stuffed in the pockets of a black leather jacket, but she looks unthreatening enough.

“Yard’s closing,” Robbie says, moving towards her. “If you need to sell a junker, you can call the number on the gate.”

“Oh no, I’m not here for that,” she says quickly, waving the idea away. “What’s your name?”

The question is slightly disarming, but he answers. “Robbie.”

“Well, Robbie,” the girl says, sounding like she’s attempting to charm him at least a little, “I am looking for a guy with a sweet black ’69 Charger. Thought maybe he bought some parts here.”

 _Way too specific to be clueless,_ Robbie thinks, schooling his expression to be carefully blank.

“Sorry, doesn’t ring a bell,” he lies. “I only work nights once a week.”

The girl doesn’t seem worried. “Well, maybe I’ll come back in the morning. Thank you.” She turns to go, and Robbie sighs internally.

 _Set yourself up for that one, Robbie,_ he scolds himself.

“Or…” he calls after her, and she looks back, “there’s a book of sales you can flip through in the main office.”

She smiles, relieved. “That’d be great. Thank you.”

She follows him through the deserted junkyard until he points her ahead towards the trailer.

“That’s it there.” He pulls his keys from his pocket, flipping them against his palm out of habit as she takes the lead.

“You live around here?” he asks, checking her waistband for weapons.

“No. I used to,” she answers, glancing back once. “Just in town for a couple of days, soaking up the sun.”

_You’re awfully covered up for me to believe that._

He flips his keys again, and the girl suddenly stops walking.

“Strange place to spend your vacation,” he notes, pausing his steps too as he smacks his keys against his gloved hand again.

She turns slowly towards him, and he can tell from the look in her eyes that she knows something she shouldn’t.

_Get her somewhere quiet and find out what she knows._

He lunges for her, but she raises one hand and does something he can’t see, something that sends him flying several feet backwards and slamming into the siding of a van.

She lowers her hand, not looking at all surprised by this turn of events, facing him bravely.

_Huh. Another one._

“So,” he says, elbowing out of the sunken metal. He reaches for a nearby crowbar and lights it up with hell fire. “You’ve got the devil inside you too?”

~

Their fight is a blur of flames and flying blows, and Daisy is more confused than scared by the presence of fire. She manages to knock the flaming bar away from him, but the hits he lands with his gloved hands seem to still be hotter than humanly possible. He also seems a lot stronger than a guy his size ought to be, but she’s still a trained agent and knows how to play to her advantages.

And she’s got her powers, so…

“You shouldn’t have gotten involved,” the guy—Robbie—glares at her as she pins him against a steel beam with a continuous pulse of air.

“Serial killers always complain when you try to intervene,” she responds, narrowing her eyes. This _has_ to be the guy she saw attack the gang the other night, but she’s wondering where he’s hiding the flaming skull.

He smirks. “I only kill those who deserve it. It’s vengeance _chica_.”

“Vengeance for what?” she snaps. “You killed a detective!”

“Well, he had blood on his hands,” Robbie answers without remorse.

She punches him across the face, hard enough to open a gash on his cheekbone, and it feels like a jolt of electricity lights up her entire body.

It’s the first time they’ve touched skin-to-skin.

_Wait._

_That must be…_

_That means he…_

_Oh god, no…_

“You killed a teacher!” she shouts instead, staring at him, waiting for his reaction to the jolt he must be feeling too, but he doesn’t show one.

“A pedophile,” Robbie shrugs, then suddenly smacks her arm away and punches her backwards. She responds with a roundhouse kick that has the force of her powers behind it, one that sends him through the siding of the shed, where he lands beneath the contents of a shelf.

“You don’t get to decide who deserves to die!” she snarls, marching up to him.

_Stay focused. Finish what you came here to do. It doesn’t matter what else he may be, he just admitted to being a killer…_

He looks up at her, the nearby fires lighting up his profile. “I’m not the one who decides,” he says slowly.

His eyes light up with flames, and suddenly his head follows suit.

Daisy feels the agony as the flesh falls away, disappearing in the flames and leaving only illuminated bone behind, and the familiar headache and heat are nearly enough to make her fall to her knees. She presses through the pain, though, knowing that it could very well mean her life, and though she is able to knock away the flaming beam he swings at her, his punch is hard enough to hurl her to the ground. She sees him pulling down a heavy shelf to crush her and raises her hands automatically, holding it back with her powers even as she gasps with pain from both her head and her brittle arms…

The man with the flaming skull crouches beside her, simply watching, and she does the one thing she never thought she’d do.

“Do it. I deserve it.”

_Maybe if you kill me, then you’ll die too…_

But he only gazes at her for a long moment before standing and walking away. She gives up holding back the shelf and lunges out of the way just in time, feeling the immediate relief in the headache as she hears his car driving away. She lies on the dirty concrete floor for a few minutes, gasping and reeling from everything she’s just learned, and probably would have punched the ground had her arms not ached so much.

_Five years of headaches and fevers it all comes back to this—my soulmate apparently lights up like a matchstick every once in a while._

_Guess I’m lucky my head wasn’t actually catching fire every time._

_But he’s a killer. A remorseless killer who I’m apparently bonded to for life._

_Just my fucking luck._

She hacks into traffic cameras that night and tracks him down the next day, and once she has his full name, it takes only a few minutes on the internet before she has everything else.

~

The same girl is at the auto shop the next day, poking and prodding with double entendres within earshot of his coworkers, muttering facts about his past that tell him she’s done her homework, that she knows way too much about his life already while he still doesn’t know her name.

Once they’re alone in the shop that afternoon, he finally rounds on her.

“What do you _want_?”

“I looked into your kills,” she responds calmly. “Some of them check out.”

“I told you. It’s vengeance,” he repeats.

“Well vengeance seems to put you on the same track as me, so tell me what you know.”

He shakes his head. “Look, detective, they got what they deserved—end of story.”

She shakes her head, raising her voice a little now that Rigo has stepped out. “All right, now I’ll tell you what I know—there’s a group called the Watchdogs—they’re hunting people like us.”

“Us?” he repeats, raising an eyebrow.

“Inhumans.”

_So that’s what you are._

“That’s not what I am,” he says, feeling slightly relieved. He brushes past her to put his tools away, organizing them carefully in the crates.

“Look, I understand what you’re going through, and I’ve been where you are, but killing is _not_ —“

He rounds on her. “You here to counsel me? You wanna save my soul? I’m telling you, girl, I sold mine.”

She gives him a tired, skeptical look. “To the devil?”

He shrugs again. “He was the only one buying.” He picks up the last wrench, holding it loosely but taking a slow step towards her. “Look, I’m done talking. You want to throw down again, we can do that—I like my chances. Want to turn me in? Try it. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

She doesn’t back away, just folds her arms. “You may not, but _Gabe_ might be a little sad to lose his big brother. You’re all he’s got now, after all.”

Rigo suddenly sticks his head back in the garage, calling to Robbie that he’s got to tow a car out to Palm Desert as he plucks the keys off a rack.

“Take all the time you need,” Robbie calls back. “I’ll lock up.”

When the door is safely closed again, Robbie lights up the wrench and glares at the girl, feeling his eyes growing hot.

“You shouldn’t have mentioned my brother.”

This time, she’s slower, and he has her tied to a chair in the garage’s office in no time. He paws through her van, which she’s obviously been living in, pulling together a pile of her things that might give him some clue of who she is and what the hell she’s doing here.

“Your arm is fractured, not broken,” he tells her when she comes to.

“How do you know that?” she demands with narrowed eyes.

“I’ve seen a lot of injuries in my day,” he says, flipping through a stack of passports, driver’s licenses, and car registrations. Same picture, but all different names.

“What are you looking for?” she mutters, watching him.

“Proof that you deserve what you asked for,” he answers, noticing how she shrinks back the tiniest bit at those words. “Then my problem goes away, and you get your wish.”

He doesn’t find much incriminating other than some obvious evidence of identity theft, petty theft, and tax evasion. There’s actually more evidence that she’s been tracking some pretty bad people, people who he’s seen publicly ruined in the past few months, or people he himself has taken care of. But then he flips open a notebook that has a few photos stuck between the pages, and he catches the pain in her gaze as she turns her head away.

“Hm. We’re not so different, you and me,” Robbie says, looking at the pictures of a few smiling strangers. “You just feel bad for the dead in your wake. I don’t feel anything.”

“Can you _feel_ that my arm is fractured?” the girl asks, a strange question that Robbie simply ignores.

“If you not feeling anything were true,” she says next, “you would have killed me by now. Are you really telling me you don’t feel curious about what’s going on out there? Those skinheads you killed the other night were working with the Chinese. Does that happen a lot around here? I didn’t think so. And outfitted with RPGs…”

She keeps going, joining threads, and Robbie listens while pretending not to be.

“They won’t stop until a lot of people are dead. And who knows what kind of weapon they stole from that energy lab in Pasadena…”

He knows that place well. A few memories surface, pieces falling into place.

She protests as he jumps to his feet and grabs his keys, so he puts a piece of tape over her mouth before rushing out to the car. He figures she wouldn’t dare using whatever powers she has to break free of her restraints, since using them the last time seemed to be what fractured her arm.

But apparently, he’s underestimated her determination, since almost as soon as he’s roared out of the parking lot in the Charger, there’s a thud as she lands on the roof of the car, holding on even as he swerves down the roads, trying to shake her off. Only the flames from his engine finally deter her, and he leaves her lying where she lands in the road.

She still manages to catch up with him at the lab somehow, and they save two guys that she apparently knows from some kind of ghost that locked one of them in an energy reactor. Robbie finds a picture of the science team on the wall, one that includes Tio, and stalks out without saying anything to the other three.

Gabe asks why he’s so quiet at dinner that night, and Robbie eventually asks the right questions to pool their information about what Uncle Eli used to do.

The next day, he finds the girl walking down the road (he never fixed her van, after all) and pulls up next to her.

“You want to know what’s connecting these things?” he says, staring hard at her, trying to prove that he’s serious.

“Yeah,” she says, staring back.

“I think it might be me.”

~

Robbie is quiet for most of the drive, but he slowly fills her in on his uncle, Eli Morrow, and his connection to Momentum Energy Labs. Eli is in prison now, and that’s where they’re headed when a pulse abruptly blows out all the lights and stalls the engine of every car but his. 

He shoves her back in the car and red-lines it all the way to his brother’s area of town, worried that the blackout will make people bold enough to hurt a crippled kid minding his own business.

“Calm down before you go all carrot-top again,” Daisy scolds, holding on to the armrest as he tears through the car-strewn streets.

“Stress has nothing to do with it,” her driver says, and she rolls her eyes.

“What exactly is _it,_ because I still don’t buy the whole ‘I sold my soul’ thing,” she says, trying to sound nonchalant.

“I don’t give a damn what you buy,” Robbie growls, his hands tight on the steering wheel. “I’m the one stuck with it.”

“Did _it_ start about five years ago?” she dares to ask, and this time he shoots her a sideways glance.

“Why would you think that?”

She takes a deep breath. “Because that’s when I started getting really terrible headaches.”

He just shoots her another glare, his brow furrowed. “You think that has anything to do with me?”

When they find Gabe on the streets, they have to throw off four guys to protect him. She uses her powers to hurl the one with the gun into the back of a car and hears a snap a half-second before she feels the pain.

Gabe is confused as Robbie lifts him from his wheelchair and puts him in the shotgun seat. “This is Daisy,” he introduces her as she falls into the backseat, grimacing in pain. She’s had worse, far worse, but she can tell her arm is really broken now, and that’s no joke.

It’s dark when they pull up to the house that apparently belongs to the Reyes boys, so Robbie lights candles once Gabe is safely in the house and the doors are locked.

“We need to do something about your arm,” he eventually says, turning to Daisy. “I head it snap. Can’t believe you haven’t passed out.”

She sinks into a chair. “I can’t go to the hospital.”

He nods. “Well, I figured that much.”

She scowls at him. “What do _you_ do when you get hurt during your…night job? Do you have a guy?”

He glances towards Gabe, who seems to be out of earshot in the other room. “I don’t get hurt.” He points to his right cheek. “You gave me a pretty bad gash at the junkyard. Now, not a scratch.”

Daisy stares at him, suddenly understanding the last five years and why the only pains she’s dealt with are the headaches and fevers…

_Why maybe he isn’t feeling your broken arm too…_

“I’ve been stabbed,” Robbie continues. “Shot. Run over…twice. Never feel any of it. Next day, I’m good as new.”

Daisy exhales. “Lucky you.” _Lucky me that all I’ve been feeling is these migraines._

“Lucky me,” he repeats, sounding like he doesn’t see it that way at all. “Point is, I don’t know how to help you.”

The dismissiveness in his voice makes her finally snap.

“Do you not _feel_ this?” she hisses, shaking her arm as much as she can without screaming and glaring hard at him. “How can you not feel this too?”

In the flickering candlelight, Robbie stares at her, seeming mostly confused.

“You broke your right arm in 1995,” Daisy says, staring steadily at him. “Split your chin open in 1998. Broke two fingers in 2005. And then five years ago your skull started combusting whenever it needed to, but I think right before that, something happened that almost killed you. Am I wrong about any of that?”

Robbie looks aghast, sitting down slowly in the chair across the table. He looks away for a moment, but when he meets her eyes again, Daisy can tell he understands.

“So it’s you.”

She sighs, finally looking away. “I guess it is.”

She has no idea what to say next, but she winces as he sets an icepack over her throbbing arm. “I don’t feel anything,” he says apologetically, looking down at his hands instead of at her. “Not since the other guy started sharing this space. I thought maybe…when he came in, whatever bond I might have had with another person…broke.”

“But you felt things before?” Daisy asks hopefully, and he finally looks up.

“Did you dislocate your shoulder once when you were little?”

She feels the first flicker of a smile. “Yeah. Someone pushed me off a bunk bed when I was eight.”

“And you felt all that stuff when I was younger…” he breathes, then meets her eyes again, looking alarmed. “Do you feel me get hurt now? Now that I’m… _him_?”

She shakes her head, relieved all over again that this isn’t the case. “No…but I’ve been getting these sudden, terrible headaches and fevers for years now…usually at night. I think that might be when you…”

He smirks sadly. “…Light up?”

“Yeah.”

He shakes his head, glancing down at her arm again. “I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that.”

A moment passes in silence, and she finally looks up, drawing his gaze and asking the question she’s been wondering about since the other night.

“So what does this mean?”

He looks at her, seeming as clueless as she feels, then finally stands, picking up his keys.

“First things first—we need to take care of your arm.”

He heads to the door, calling to Gabe that he’s going to run to a pharmacy and then go take care of the shop. He isn't back by the time the power comes back on, and Gabe watches her continue stoically icing her arm before calling her by the name the headlines have labelled her in these past few months.

She stares at him, but he doesn’t look malicious.

“Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me…” the boy says, “as long as you leave. Robbie needs good people around him, and that’s not you. So you ought to go now while you have the chance.”

She does.

When she and Robbie crash back into each other’s lives a couple of weeks later, he’s saving her and Jemma’s lives from James and his “hellfire” nonsense. Coulson herds them both into the plane and gives them a mission, one that connects Morrow, the ghost boxes, and some weird book. She listens to Robbie finally tell Gabe the truth about his night job, learns why she collapsed in a parking lot a few years ago. They chase Morrow down at a Roxxon lab across the country…

And then Robbie disappears from her world completely.

~

Robbie feels sick. He, Fitz, and Coulson can see everything around them, hear everyone around them, but people keep walking right through them, and he can’t understand where they are if they’re not dead.

 _This isn’t what death feels like,_ he thinks _. It was darker. It was quiet._

And he can still feel the devil pressing against the inside of his chest, the inside of his skull, as if fighting against the current of darkness that is trying to pull him and the others away…

The pain climaxes as the plane lands, and Robbie collapses, feeling like the devil is lighting his whole body on fire this time.

“He won’t go,” he gasps as Fitz hovers over him. “He won’t go!”

And suddenly the fire vanishes. He looks up in time to see the devil pass into Mack, send him speeding off on some mission of vengeance. But Robbie at first can’t move, confused by this new pain he feels. His left arm aches, his joints ache, his bones ache. But when Daisy throws herself into the Charger to drive after Mack, he rallies enough to get himself in the car after her.

“Please be careful with my baby,” he says, knowing she can’t hear him as she speeds through the streets after the lone motorcyclist.

She scrapes the side against a brick alley wall though as she takes a shortcut, and Robbie grimaces.

“No, no, no…” he groans, feeling the pain as the car is jostled by the collision…

_It’s not your pain. It’s hers._

He doesn’t have much time to marvel at it as she tears through the streets towards the warehouse where Mack is headed, but now that he understands, everything feels different. The way everything is amplified, echoing in his bones…

_This must be what her powers do to her…_

They get where they need to be, and he confronts the thing in Mack before Daisy catches up and confronts Mack himself.

“I wanted you gone, but our work isn’t done!” Robbie shouts at the demon inside the man. “Eli is still out there and we need to stop him!”

“ _We_? There is no _we_ ,” the thing says with Mack’s voice. “Your time is over.”

Robbie stands his ground. “We had a deal—you still owe me vengeance!”

“Mack has a lot of pain—he lost Hope,” the thing tells him, speaking with its immortal knowledge. “I could survive off his pain for years. I know where you’re being dragged down to—I’ve escaped it before, and I’m never going back there.”

Robbie already knows that he has only one more thing to offer—the one thing this being has hopefully always wanted.

“Then how about a new deal—give me my vengeance on Eli, help me settle my score, and I’ll settle yours—all of yours!”

The fire fills him again, burning away the blackness. His last thought before it’s too late is that he wishes Daisy didn’t have to feel this too…

~

They get their guys back safely, and it takes the combined efforts of Elena, Robbie, Radcliffe, AIDA, Director Mace, Coulson, and the rest of their team to thwart Morrow’s plan.

She is downstairs with Fitz, Simmons, Radcliffe, and AIDA trying to stabilize the portal they’ve built, absorbing tremors as Morrow creates them, when suddenly she feels the breath go out of her as a fever and headache wrack her body.

“Daisy!” Jemma exclaims as her legs buckle and she sags against the frame. “Hold on! You can do it!”

Above them, the portal opens, and she feels the exact moment that Morrow disappears through it.

Her headache and fever vanish too.

And, even without hearing the report through the comms, she knows what has happened.

_He’s gone…_

“I’ve gotta get outside… it’s too much…” she gasps, pushing through the others and scrambling for daylight. Fitz thinks she means the quakes, Simmons thinks she means the headache.

They’re both right and wrong.

She stumbles into the rest of the world, the world she knows Robbie just gave his life to save, and when she plummets back down to earth, she can’t direct her landing to be away from the crowd of reporters. Director Mace ad-libs her efforts as a secret SHIELD agent, but back at the base that night, they make it official.

The black Dodge Charger is still in the Zephyr, and Daisy realizes that it’s all that’s left of the Rider in their world.

“I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of Mr. Reyes,” Coulson comforts her before they go back into the base together.

Daisy trails her hand over the hood of the car as she leaves and hopes she’s right.

~

Months later, after robots and alternate realities have scrambled her thoughts to the point of madness but their Zephyr is bringing home her team safely back to the same blown-apart base, Daisy is racing through the halls trying to make a plan to trap the ever-vengeful AIDA when she feels a familiar, white-hot pain wrap around her skull.

She stumbles and falls to her knees, but when May races back to help her up, Daisy is actually smiling in disbelief as she raises her head.

“Robbie,” she gasps, staggering to her feet. “May, Robbie’s back.”


End file.
